Senior Thesis: The Big, Bad Outline

10 out of 10 seniors who survived Senior Thesis and look back on their thesis experience with awe and wonder remark, “If you have a fabulous outline, you will have a fabulous paper!”

Outline DUE: ___________________________

Your outline is worth 100 points. Outlines submitted past deadline (anytime after our class time), will automatically be devalued to 50 points, or half credit, or failing, at BEST.

What your outline needs to look like to EARN full credit:

1. Your fab THESIS STATEMENT (1-3 sentences, typed in full)

2. Minimum of THREE (3) BIG IDEA headings (these are not your paragraphs, but grounding ideas to help the reader through your paper). These are your roman numerals (I, II, III, and maybe IV)

3. A GOAL STATEMENT under each BIG IDEA heading, beginning with these words: “To prove ______________________” – Think, “What do I want to prove in this section?”

4. SUBHEADING (i.e. a breakdown) of each BIG IDEA heading. These are your upper-case letters (A., B., C.,...). These may be your paragraphs later in your paper. Subheadings answer how/why you will prove a BIG IDEA heading

5. TEXTUAL EVIDENCE to support BIG IDEA subheading. These are marked visually in your outline by regular numbers (1., 2., 3., 4.,…). Begin with evidence, in the form of:

a. Quotes with parenthetical citation – typed in FULLb. Paraphrased evidence with parenthetical citationc. Specific examples, moments from books

Remember: 3 primary sources must be represented evenly in each BIG IDEA 6-8 secondary sources must be represented evenly in the paper

6. A completed WORKS CITED page with SS and PS (proper MLA format).

7. FORMAT. Follow the outline exactly. Size 12 Times New Roman, single-spaced, last name and page number at the top-right header.

My advice: 1. Return to your thesis to know where to go next.2. Full sentences [or detailed phrases], not single words.3. Set up a Microsoft Word Outline format before you begin your outline; it will save you time at

the end. Be cognizant of indents, tabs, spacing, etc. Your outline should look presentable and professional.

4. Big Idea Headings, Goal Statements, Sub-Headings, and evidence must relate to and support your thesis. Return to your thesis as you type.

CAVEATS: The outline takes a lot of time and effort. Trust me. Plan ahead.

** If you finish before deadline and would like to “add to” your outline, below each textual evidence, add analysis, answering: How/why does it help to prove, support, or advance your subheading of big idea? **

A Model Outline: Keep this with you as you typeNotice indentations and be sure to write word-for-word any text in bold

Vasilis KostantinidisMs. HurtubiseEnglish 1213 March 2009

Clever Title

Thesis Statement:

The American novelist Cormac McCarthy writes with awe inspiring diction in his award winning novels, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, and The Road, while highlighting the significant use of the themes of violent imagery, setting, and character importance, McCarthy confirms that modern-day society can/will suffer if it is exposed to constant evil and intangible environments.

I. BIG IDEA Heading #1: (the first of 3-5 major points in your paper):

GOAL STATEMENT: McCarthy uses violence within his storylines to show dystopia in his novels because it depicts human instincts, lawlessness, and the redemptive power of violence, within a corrupt society.

A. Subheading #1 of Big Idea Heading #1: The violent imagery used to describe gruesome human instincts and human nature.

1. “He was gurgling and bleeding from the mouth. He was strangling on his own blood Chigurh only hauled it harder. The nickel-plated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy’s right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it” (NCFOM, 6).

2. “They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblack paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes” (BM, 226).

3. “What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry” (TR, 203).

4. “Acts of violence are repeated with numbing regularity, to the point that the reader becomes almost immune to the cruelty” (Magill, 2).

5. “Highlighting [this] dissonance seems to be consistent with the broader works of McCarthy, where, for example, in Blood Meridian, he raises basic questions about human nature and morality within the context of scalp-hunting” (Rambo, 106).

6. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

B. Subheading #2 of Big Idea Heading #1: Shows lawlessness and lack of social stability.1. “He pulled the pistol from the waistband of his trousers and turned around to where the two men were standing

and show them once each through the head in rapid succession and put the gun back in his belt” (NCFOM, 60).2. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate

practitioner” (BM, 248).3. “The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb” (TR, 109).4. “One might go further and suggest that The Road bristles with allegorical suggestions that its post holocaust

world is really an image in extremis of our own world…” (Trotter, 2).5. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

C. Subheading #3 of Big Idea Heading #1: Uses violent acts (e.g.: war, murder, etc.) to shows redemption and omnipotence and authority.

1. “’ When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the en. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see?’ ‘Yet’, she said, sobbing. ‘I do. I truly do’. ‘Good’, he said, ‘That’s good’. Then he shot her” (NCFOM, 260)

2. “War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god” (BM 249).3. “The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired from a two-

handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead” (TR, 75).

4. Textual Evidence… (MLA parenthetical citation).

5. “Key components of the redemptive paradigm are employed by the father, but the reader is pressed to think, towards the end? The biblical imagery and religious allusions cannont be places or interpreted within a traditional framework of redemption” (Rambo, 101).

6. Have quote about how some –secondary source—believes that BM’s characters use scalping to show redemption”

7. “[He] is suggesting that there is a redemptive power in self-sacrificing human love that transcends the futility of human existence in a lawless and indifferent cosmos” (Trotter, 1).

8. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

D. … E… F… etc. as needed

II. BIG IDEA Heading #2: (the second of 3-5 major points in your paper):

GOAL STATEMENT: To prove that McCarthy uses setting to show dystopia.

A. Subheading #1 of Big Idea Heading #2: Nihilism/Nihilistic writing style helps show that he’s trying to show destruction of surroundings where nothing exists.

1. “Then he realized that he would never see his truck again. Well, he said. There’s lots of things you ain’t goin’ to see again” (NCFOM, 29).

2. “They rode out onto the desert to camp. There was no wind and there silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against” (BM, 226).

3. “How would you know if you were the last man on earth? He said. I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn’t make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too” (TR, 143).

4. “McCarthy’s strong and often apunctuative style blends neologism and archaism in a syntax sometimes drawing on the rhythms of the Bible” (Bill Baines, 1).

5. “McCarthy has distanced himself from the literary traditions that deviate from strict realism” (Cooper, 4).6. … 6… 7… etc. as needed.

B. Subheading #2 of Big Idea Heading #2: Vivid detail within the writing of McCarthy’s setti ngs helps capture the significance of society within his novels.

1. Textual Evidence to prove/support Subheading of Big Idea Heading #1 (MLA par. citation).2. “Ten days out with four men dead they started across a plain of pure pumice where there grew no scrub, no

weed, far as the eye could see... [He] called up the Mexican who served as a guide. This looks like the high road to hell to me, said a man from the ranks… I believe they’re supposed to just grit up on this sand like some chickens and be ready for the shelled corn when it does come” (BM, 45).

3. “He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble… A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold… The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline” (TR, 220).

4. “One of the things [he] is most effective at doing id denying his readers comfort, which he does by staging moral conversations in the most immoral places” (Rambo, 106).

5. … 6… 7… etc. as needed.

C. Subheading #3 of Big Idea Heading #2: Hopelessness depicting in his settings helps extrapolate and make reference to the hopelessness of humanity and human existence.

1. “The country has not had an unsolved homicide in fourty-one years. Now we got nine of em in one week” (NCFOM, 216).

2. “He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw bears and lions turned loose in pits to fight wild bulls to the death and he was twice in the city of San Francisco and twice saw it burn and never went back” (BM, 312).

3. “Two more days. Then three. They were starving right enough. The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb. The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle” (TR, 109).

4. Textual Evidence… (MLA parenthetical citation).5. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

D. … E… F… etc. as needed

III.Big Idea Heading #3: (the third of 3-5 major points in your paper):

GOAL STATEMENT: To prove that McCarthy uses his characters [not necessarily main characters] to represent humanity.

A. Subheading #1 of Big Idea Heading #3: His characters that attempt to play God-like figures (omnipotent roles) help demonstrate humanity because they show instability and immortal traits/attributes.

1. “I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning” (NCFOM, 259).

2. “With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away the moonlight” (BM, 55).

3. “He took the boy’s hand and pushed the revolver into it. Take it, he whispered. Take it. The boy was terrified. He put his arm around him and held him. His body was so thin. Don’t be afraid, he said. If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand? Stop crying. Do you understand?” (TR, 95).

4. “Chigurh, repeatedly associated with “devils” and “ghosts”, has a strong lingering scent of magical realism, much like the ageless and underlying Judge Holden” (Cooper, 4).

5. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

B. Subheading #2 of Big Idea Heading #3: McCarthy’s believes humanity suffers from the element of fate and fear is the cousin of fate which will cause one to collapse/fail.

1. “You aim to quit while you’re ahead? And I said no mam I just aim to quit. I ain’t ahead by a damn sight. I never will be” (NCFOM 296).

2. “It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can ind meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow” (BM, 19).

3. “‘What was the bravest thing you ever did?’ He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. ‘Getting up this morning’, he said” (TR, 229).

4. Textual Evidence… (MLA parenthetical citation).5. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

C. Subheading #3 of Big Idea Heading #3: Humanity suffers from immense exposure to violent and/or graphic sequences (highlighted in McCarthy’s vivid writing style) which shows man vs. gruesome society.

1. “If the rule you followed led you to this what use was the rule? ...Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh looked at his watch. The new day was still a minute away” (NCFOM, 177-8).

2. “…seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind.” (BM, 53).

3. “An old mattress darkly strained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. ‘Jesus’ he whispered” (TR, 93).

4. “The infection of violence in the novel therefore reflects the historical peak in violence along the boarder in the early 1980s” (Cooper, 10).

5.6. … 6… 7… etc. as needed

D. …E...F… etc. as needed

IV. … V… VI… etc. as needed

***Not sure how I am going to do this but I was thinking about including a section or EDITING a section in order to show internal and external conflicts/wars.

This could either be man vs. society, man vs. man, or humanity vs. life and immoral society?***